Paperback Novels Research Articles

Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington by Robert W. Hamblin

Reviewed by: Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington by Robert W. Hamblin Joseph T. Reiff Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington. By Robert W. Hamblin. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. xvi, 148. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1142-4.) In early 1965, University of Mississippi English professor Evans Harrington (1925–1997) took a stand that almost cost him his job. With the 1962 riot in response to James Meredith's arrival as the university's first African American student now two-and-a-half years past, the university sought to repair its academic image by hosting the Southern Literary Festival, with Harrington as its organizer and director. When Tougaloo College, a historically black school and headquarters for the Jackson, Mississippi, civil rights movement, applied to send a delegation to the event, Harrington paved the way for its attendance, which would make this the festival's first integrated meeting. The university administration had second thoughts and insisted on approval from the state university's governing board. In a letter to Chancellor John D. Williams, Harrington sharply criticized the university's timidity and promised to resign if Tougaloo's invitation were withdrawn, but the state board unexpectedly approved the University of Mississippi's hosting of the festival and the Tougaloo delegation's participation in it. Robert W. Hamblin is a scholar of William Faulkner and a former student of Harrington's; Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington seeks "to highlight the principal aspects of [Harrington's] life and career that make him noteworthy" since he is "practically unknown beyond his native state" (pp. xii, xi). Beginning as a writer (he was the author of three mass-market paperback novels published under the pseudonym Gilbert Terrell in the 1960s), Harrington taught at the University of Mississippi from 1951 to 1988, eventually completing a Ph.D. and chairing the English Department. He "is representative of a type of southerner who is too often overlooked . . . a white southern moderate who, though definitely in the minority and at times even subjected to the threat of violence, refused to leave, . . . seeking to effect changes in the status quo" (p. 126). The book's title comes from Harrington's 1966 essay "Living in Mississippi" (published in 1968 in Yale Review), "a poignant treatment of his ambivalent feelings about being a liberal in a conservative and often reactionary state and region that he dearly loved" (p. 21). Hamblin explores Harrington's life from three angles: political, academic, and literary. Harrington's political sensibilities came alive in response to the 1962 riot and found voice and action in the university's chapter of the American Association of University Professors, in a public letter responding to the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, and in participating in both the Mississippi Council on Human Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union. This activism made Harrington a surveillance target of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. As an academic, Harrington is best known for cofounding (with Ann J. Abadie) the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha [End Page 1060] Conference at the University of Mississippi in 1974 and directing it through 1994. His teaching, scholarship, and leadership made their mark on the university and its students, including his mentoring of writers such as Steve Yarbrough, Jere Hoar, and Julie Smith. Harrington's academic commitments eclipsed his literary career, and he virtually abandoned fiction writing after the 1960s. The son and grandson of Southern Baptist preachers, he became "something of an agnostic" as an adult, and his novels reflect his rebellion against a white Christianity too closely intertwined with white supremacy and segregation (p. 5). Hamblin's book benefits from a wide range of sources, including Harrington's published writings, several unpublished manuscripts, personal letters, and Hamblin's interviews with numerous colleagues and friends of Harrington's. Of special interest are Harrington's letters to his close friend Robert Canzoneri, author of "I Do So Politely": A Voice from the South (1965); Harrington wrote him between 1956 and 1977 with revealing candor and introspection. Hamblin's intimate portrait of "a man-in-the-middle, pulled in opposing directions by the cultural forces that...

Demand Analysis of Novels Released as Books and Pocket-Sized Paperbacks in Japan

The present study estimates demand functions for novels released as books and pocket-sized paperbacks to examine factors affecting demand by format. The results show that the effects on the number of copies sold of an author’s celebrity, tie-in with a movie or television program, and literary awards differ statistically between the two formats. In addition, the findings show that demand for book and pocket-sized paperback novels is price elastic, imply that there is room for reviewing the Japanese fixed-price system. Furthermore, electronic publishing reduces printed novel sales, although the ratio of novels accessible as e-books to printed novels is relatively low in Japan.

Jim Thompson – dark poet of the plains

Abstract This article considers the life and career of the American novelist Jim Thompson, whose bleak vision of American society, and the Midwest in particular, led him to write a series of highly praised and influential ‘hard-boiled’ paperback novels, which were initially dismissed as popular entertainment, but are now considered American classics, showing the dark underside of the American Dream. Thompson laboured in obscurity for much of his life, and dealt with poverty, despair, alcoholism and the Great Depression, but triumphed late in life as his work gained prestige in France and England, and finally was adapted for the screen. Thompson’s life demonstrates that even in the absolute depths of commercial fiction, one can create a unique and compelling personal vision.

Hefty Dictionaries in Incomprehensible Tongues: Commensurating Code and Language Community in Turkey

In this article, I consider one aspect of the larger linguistic–political project of rendering Kurdish an “equivalent” language in a world of standard languages: the material contours of text artifacts, and their commensurating capacities. In Turkey, where Turkish has long been the sole officially sanctioned code of public life, the project of asserting equivalence takes place in no small part as a function of an increasingly textualized and widely circulating Kurdish. Inserting Kurdish, both spoken and printed, into ever more arenas—disrupting the expectations of which code goes with which context—has become a central plank in a Kurdish political project. Yet relatively few people actually read the texts in question. The circulation of largely unread Kurdish texts allows us to investigate how material qualities of text objects—shape, sheen, heft, etc.—contribute to the assertion of particular forms of linguistic commensurability. I examine how textual forms anchor affiliations of loyalty and allegiance to language community, even without necessarily transforming speech practices and norms of pragmatic usage. In the Kurdish project of commensurating codes, the circulation of textual artifacts—stacked newspapers, glossy street signs, hefty dictionaries, paperback novels—works to signal the presence of the genres they are presumed to contain. At least three commensurating processes are at play here: between spoken Kurdish and its textual equivalent; between “Kurdish” and “Turkish” as the orienting codes of their respective language communities; and between “Kurds” and “Turks” as members of those communities, participants in a fiercely contested struggle over sovereignty and resources. At stake in these assertions of linguistic equivalence—the normative purchase of a would-be newly commensurate Kurdish—are politically and socially consequential mappings of groupness, polity, and political legitimacy.

Marriage, Murder, and Memoirs

susan Branson. Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. ix + 182. Il- lustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. It is rare that academic historians write books that readers simply put down until they get to the very last page to find out how the story ends. Susan Branson wrote such a book and, in part, her success in keeping this reader's interest to the last page stems from the remarkable story she tells of two women who defied gender and class conventions in early nineteenth- century Philadelphia. Ann Carson and Mary Clarke together were involved in everything that makes for the kind of reading we usually associate with the guilty pleasures of paperback novels some of us love to peruse during the summer. For Carson, this includes a marriage gone bad because of an alcoholic, older husband who disappears for five years only to resurface just when the abandoned wife, presuming him dead, has married a man nearly a decade younger than herself; a jealous and mean-spirited husband who ends up dead at the hands of the younger man; a desperate woman trying to save the man she loves from the gallows by attempting to kidnap the governor to force him into pardoning the young lover; the downward spiral into rob- bery, counterfeiting, courtroom drama, destitution and an untimely death in prison. All of this is topped off by the second woman, Clarke, whose early widowhood leads her to make a living with her pen and eventually to invite Carson into her home so she can write Carson's life story, thus becoming one of the country's first sensationalist writers. The twists and turns in the lives of both women are enough to fill the pages of a short book, and Branson's astute analysis of the events convinces the reader that history for the sake of interesting stories is not dead. This is the kind of book one can easily assign to undergraduate students, especially in survey courses, to illustrate that pre- scribed gender and class norms of the early Republic cannot begin to account for the variety of activities women pursued (p. 138). That is not to say that graduate students and seasoned scholars would not benefit from Branson's thoughtful and engaging work.

Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture

This study outlines the rise of gay consumer culture from 1945 to 1969—an examination of the production, sale, and consumption of physique magazines, paperback novels, greeting cards, and other items available through gay-oriented mail order catalogs. It agues that purchasing such consumer items validated gay men’s erotic attraction to other men, contributed to their sense of participating in a larger community, and provided particular class-, race-and gender-based models for what it meant to be gay. It examines how physique magazine publishers, in their legal struggles with censorship laws, marshaled a ground-breaking rhetoric of legal rights and collective action that led to the first gay judicial victories establishing the right to market such commodities. It demonstrates that a national gay commercial market preceded the development of a national gay political community and that the development of that market by a small group of gay entrepreneurs was a key, overlooked catalyst to the rise of a gay movement in America.

GAY MARRIAGE AND PULP FICTION

Currently, most explorations of homonormativity privilege political interpretations. In contrast, this essay brackets political analysis of homonormativity's effects in order to attend more closely to the affect that helps motivate homonormative choices. Though from an external, critical perspective, particular alliances with dominant power structures may often look like blatant and cynical attempts at self-advancement, there is abundant evidence that they are more often experienced as emotionally driven, personal choices that are different from political ones and superior to them as guides for intimate behavior. Attending to this dimension of homonormative experience not only shifts current queer conversations about norms but also extends the relevance of such conversations back into the past. Ann Bannon's midcentury lesbian paperback novels are rich sources of information about the socially produced emotional situations that helped push Cold War-era gay and lesbian people into alliances with heterosexist institutions and values such as marriage. In Bannon's novels, “gay marriage” appears as a kind of representational shorthand for a happy resolution to what I suspect was the common midcentury gay dilemma of how to be both erotically and emotionally deviant, and socially conventional. Bannon depicts that dilemma as a painful suspension between simultaneous disidentifications with heterosexuality and queer abrasiveness to dominant cultural norms. Thus exploring the fantasy of gay marriage in these pulp fictions not only sheds historical light on the affective dimensions of homonormativity but also raises theoretically significant questions about the definition and political ramifications of disidentification.

Paperback Pornography: Mass Market Novels and Censorship in Post‐War America

The year 1952 was an historical one in the history of American book publishing. A special committee of the U. S. House of Representatives (the Gathings Committee) formed for the express purpose of investigating the influence of paperback books on American society. Never before or since in the history of the book in the United States has a specific format been singled out for this degree of scrutiny; but perhaps never before had one been seen as a serious threat to public morality. The House investigation followed in the wake of diverse and vocal censorship efforts designed to counter the perceived threat of paperback novels, with their suggestive cover art and titillating stories. At any other time in modern American history, protests against paperbacks might not have gained sufficient momentum to expand beyond localized censorship efforts. In the volatile political and social climate of post-War America, however, threats to the established order were taken with unprecedented seriousness. In little more than a century, paperback novels had gone from a democratizing element in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing reading material to anyone who could afford their nominal price, to a subversive influence in the mid-twentieth century, for much the same reason. While several histories of American book publishing have commented on this era of censorship, none have actually examined the texts investigated by the Gathings Committee. This article will explore censorship activities of the early 1950s, with particular emphasis on the Gathings Committee investigation, and will look closely at several of the texts cited in the committee's report. Despite provocative cover art, this author suggests that the texts ultimately reinforced rather than challenged traditional notions of sexual propriety. The mass-market paperback novel, introduced in the United States in the late 1930s, was not an original concept in publishing. The first American paperbound books were printed over a century earlier (Schreuders 31). Technological innovations facilitated the production of inexpensive books. Improvements in paper production, typesetting and printing methods coincided with the popular education movement of the 1820s and 1830s. One provided the means and the other a motive for the production and distribution of inexpensive reading material for the masses, thus ushering in the First Paperback Revolution in America. By the end of the Civil War, over four million paperback reprints had been sold in the United States. Their success ultimately might have undermined the regular book publishing industry, had not changes in copyright law in 1891 curbed the paperback reprint business (Between the Covers 68). For the next four decades, the paperbound publishing industry in the United States was defunct. In the late 1920s, the country's economic crisis fostered a resurgence of interest in inexpensive printing practices and once again led to experimentation with paperbound publishing. The first effort that produced sustained success came in 1939, when Robert DeGraff launched the publication of his Pocket Books, beginning the second paperback revolution in America. What made the Pocket Book so unique and successful was more than its portable pocket size, its low price (twenty-five cents), or its range of quality fiction titles. Pocket Books used distribution methods unlike those of regular hardcover publishers. DeGraff, who had worked in the newspaper industry, saw potential there to reach a much broader audience than through traditional book outlets. Pocket Books sold on newsstands, in drug and department stores, in cigar stores, and other places where newspapers and magazines sold. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, there were six outlets where people could shop for hardcover books. Consumers could purchase Pocket Books, however, at over 218 locations around the city. While DeGraff was not the first publisher to use newspaper distribution channels to sell books, he was by far the most successful (History 68). …

Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690-1990.

The South Carolina low country has long been regarded--not only in popular imagination and paperback novels but also by respected scholars--as region dominated by what earlier historians called a cavalier spirit and by what later historians have simply described as a wholehearted devotion to amusement and the neglect of religion and intellectual pursuits. Such images of the low country have been powerful interpreters of the region because they have had some foundation in social and cultural realities. It is thesis of this study, however, that there has been strong Calvinist community in the Carolina low country since its establishment as British colony and that this community (including in its membership both whites and after the 1740s significant numbers of African Americans) contradicts many of the images of the received version of the region. Rather than devotion to amusement and neglect of religion and intellectual interests, this community has been marked throughout most of its history by its disciplined religious life, its intellectual pursuits, and its work ethic.The complex character of this Calvinist community guides Clarke to an exploration of the ways particular religious tradition and distinct social context have interacted over 300-year period, including the unique story of the oldest and largest African American Calvinist community in America.

Letters from the avant-garde: modern graphic design

German type and book designer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) revolutionized modern typography through his bold, asymmetrical designs and use of sanserif typography, both inspired by the work of the Bauhaus. He proclaimed his new design philosophy through a series of articles and books, including Die neue Typographie, published in Berlin in 1928. His international renown came largely as a result of his redesign of Penguin's entire series of paperback novels just after World War II. Any graphic designer practicing today owes a debt to Tschichold's innovation.Jan Tschichold: A Life in offers a concise biography of Tschichold, accompanied by numerous examples of his vast body of work. It serves as an introduction to Tschichold for those who are unfamiliar with his influential style, yet for the experienced designer it is an excellent collection of the wide range of his designs. Ruari McLean's books on graphic design include Modern Book Design (1958) and Typographers on Type (1995). He is also the translator of Tschichold's The New Typography and the author of various books on Tschichold's work.

An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction , and: Murder Off The Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters (review)

Reviewed by: An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, and: Murder Off The Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters John M. Reilly Thomas J. Roberts . An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia, 1990. 284 pp. $30.00. Jon L. Breen and Martin Harry Greenberg . Murder Off The Rack: Critical Studies of Ten Paperback Masters. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1989. 178 pp. $22.50. There are two sorts of literary history that are rarely conjoined. The first and most familiar to us in the universities is the history of texts, the innovative writing that altered the course of narrative or retuned the voices of poetry. Even literary biography typically bears kinship to this sort of literary history. After all, however useful a concept such as the anxiety of influence may prove, it still relates most effectively to elite texts read in their hayday by limited audiences. If we turn [End Page 813] for conversation about reading to our biological rather than intellectual relatives, asking a parent or grandparent, for example, how impressed they were when The Waste Land or Absalom, Absalom appeared, we are likely to be met with surprise. What's that? Remember, I didn't go to college. Most of our relatives, however, were not exactly illiterate. They just read different books than our histories identify as landmarks. Maybe the record of their reading is not literary history, but at the least it is a history of literacy. The materials for such a history of popular taste are what Jon L. Breen and Martin Harry Greenberg offer us in their collection of essays on the crime and mystery novels published as paperback originals from the 1950s to the present. Succeeding the pulp magazines, paperback originals issued by Fawcett Gold Medal, Avon, Lancer, Signet, Pinnacle, and others provided apprentice experience and immediate cash for professional writers. Not a lot of cash, but maybe $2500 as an advance from Gold Medal, $750 or $1000 from other companies. Practically all of the writers who created the commodity worked in the genre of hard-boiled fiction, repeating over and over the conventions of a man on the run encountering the dames one would expect and experiencing the frissons of fear and apprehension that kept readers turning the pages. Each of the writers discussed in this volume worked almost exclusively in the paperback market. Only one—Marijane Meaker who wrote as Vin Packer—was a woman. All were prolific. Harry Whittington published 25 novels in three years, Peter Rabe did 18 novels in five years, and Warren Murphy in collaboration with Richard Sapir produced 70 paperback novels in sixteen years. The contributors to the book evidently worked as independently and differently as one might expect of the compilers of a literary (literacy) history without established theory or guidelines. Ed Gorman gives us "Fifteen Impressions of Charles Williams." Will Murray treats "The Executioner Phenomenon" begun by Don Pendleton and continued by anonymous ghosts. Max Allan Collins, in perhaps the best entry, examines the psychopathic characters of Jim Thompson, author of The Getaway, in relationship to the exemplary works of James M. Cain. The editor Jon L. Breen summons the opinions of Vin Packer's work written by Anthony Boucher, the only person regularly reviewing paperback originals for many years, to set a claim for her reputation as a serious explorer of social matter. Most of the other contributions survey works and dispense information—sometimes engagingly as when Donald E. Westlake writes about Peter Rabe—as one must expect from an inchoate form of literary history in which its practitioners feel compulsion to tally whatever seems to them important as readers. In this respect Murder Off the Rack might be described as precritical history. By contrast Thomas J. Roberts' discourse about the aesthetics of so-called junk fiction can be denominated an exercise in the assimilation of popular literature into the framework of established literary historiography. The tipoff lies in Roberts' identification of two readerships for the genre fiction he studies. One is "people whose reading is confined exclusively to these materials" such as popular fantasy, the western, science fiction, the mystery, and the romance. The other readership is "people who are well read. They have read...

Taming Monsters

TAMING MONSTERS/ Trida Tunstall THERE IS A SIGN, hand-lettered on red construction paper, on her son's bedroom door. It says: NO MONSTERS CAN COME HERE. THAT'S THE LAW. Her son dictated the words to her at bedtime one night. He watched, his wet lips parted, as she wrote the sign and taped it up. Later, getting into bed, he clung to her. "Mommy," he whispered, "can monsters read?" She reads, these days, books on child development, combing the indexes for FEARS, NIGHTTIME or MONSTERS, FEAR OF. She knows from these books that four-year-olds are commonly afraid of imaginary beings. She understands that the fears are normal and will pass. "Yes," she tells her son, "monsters can read." Her husband does not approve of this. He says that by going along with the fantasies she is reinforcing them. "Robbie," he says to his son, "there are no monsters. Right?" "Right," says Robbie. "Say it, Robbie. Say 'There are no monsters, not in New York, not anywhere.'" "There's no monsters in New York," says Robbie, bored. "Or anywhere." "Anywhere." They have this conversation at dinner one night. After dinner, Robbie will not put on his pajamas until she moves the sign lower on the door. "They can't see it so high up," he tells her. The monsters, it seems, are just about as tall as Robbie. She reads the books on child development on the subway, on her way to work. She teaches English to private students, mostly Japanese businessmen who want to improve their knowledge of the vernacular. She visits their offices for one-hour sessions; they close their doors, offer her tea, ask her questions. "What does it mean, 'wiped out'?" they say. "What does it mean, 'get down'?" She feels tremendous next to them, these smaU spruce flat-haired gentlemen who smell of scents with woodland names. She feels puff-haired, fat-kneed; her hands look too large for her pen. But she likes the work. It gives her a sense of being useful, necessary to the world's comings and goings. The gentlemen pay her weU, do their homework, correct their own grammar with beseeching 240 · The Missouri Review looks. They buy paperback novels in drugstores. "What does it mean, 'sugar daddy'?" One of her students has a friend who wants lessons. "He wants a lot lessons," says the student. "He wants lessons a lot," she corrects him. He shakes his head. "He wants a lot lessons. He has a lot money." It is a small but potent thrill, being recommended, being sought. With the student acting as intermediary, she makes an appointment with the friend. On the morning of the appointment her son bursts uncharacteristically into tears when she leaves him at nursery school. "Mommy, I have to pee," he wails, "stay till I pee!" The panic in his voice frightens her. She stands next to him at the little toilet, waiting. Now he is relaxed, conversational. "You have to shake it, see?" he teUs her. The address she has been given is north of the financial district, in Soho. As she goes up the subway steps the sun is white, polished, almost wet-looking. She wishes she knew some Japanese. She has asked several of the businessmen to teach her a few words, but they always smile and tell her, "It's very difficult, Japanese." They are the bilingual ones, not she; they want to keep it that way. She arrives at a low cast-iron building, its facade blackened by decades of fumes, its windows covered with bars. A man lies on the stoop sleeping, clutching a single running shoe like a teddy bear. She steps around him and rings the bell. There is silence for a long time. The man sleeping behind her stirs slightly, sings in his sleep. The night before her son had wakened over and over, sobbing. "I can't tell you," he had gasped when she asked what he had been dreaming. "I need some water. I'm cold. Just stay with me one minute and that's it," he promised, lying with desperate sincerity. She had finally fetched her pillow from the...

Oral History and the Old Left

On April 12, 1898, Laura Camella Hudson, daughter of a slave and wife of a sharecropper in Wilkes County, Georgia gave birth to a son, Hosea. Two years later and several thousand miles to the East, Joe Rapoport was born in the small Ukranian Jewish shtetl of Stanislavchik. And still another three years later, Stjepan Mesaros (later Steve Nelson) was born in Subocka, a village of fewer than one hundred families in the fertile farming region of Croatia. Few people would be surprised to learn that these three boys from such geographically dispersed preindus trial and rural settings would spend their adult years in American factories. After all, such sagas of the uprooted fill high school history textbooks and (with a little sex thrown in) popular paperback novels. What is remarkable here?and perhaps unsettling to those who still adhere to the dominant myths of our past?is that Hudson, Rapoport, and Nelson did not join the American middle class and struggle for social and economic success, but rather joined the American Communist party and struggled for social and economic justice. And what is even more remarkable is that these three fascinating life stories are now available to us in oral autobiogra phies collected and edited by professional historians and published by eminently respectable university presses. Both the lives of Hudson, Rapoport, and Nelson and the form of their presentation?as oral histories?command our attention. For to examine these life stories is to re-examine some of our most common assumptions about the Ameri can Communist party, to recognize that the party's history has been much richer and more complex than we have been led to believe by either the polemics of many anti-Communists or the apologetics of many Communists. Yet, while appre

Western Motifs in the Thrillers of Donald Hamilton

F R E D E R I S M A N Texas Christian University Western Motifs in the Thrillers of Donald Hamilton The mythic status of the cowboy hero, lean, laconic, and lethal, is a commonplace in Western studies. No less commonplace is the assertion of the Westerner’s kinship with the equally mythic private detective or secret agent.1 The two figures, students of the Western generally agree, share many personal qualities; they are also alike in the degree to which the modem thriller, like the modern Western, raises questions of the individualistic hero in society, the inevitable consequences of his actions, and the increasing moral ambiguity of those same actions.2 Despite this widespread agreement, though, comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which those qualities that give the Western its characteristic flavor also appear in the urban, technological thriller. A valuable demonstration of the parallels between these two major forms of popular fiction appears in the novels of Donald Hamilton. Hamilton, who was born in Sweden in 1916, served in the United States Navy during World War II and afterwards turned to free-lance writing. He soon became known as the author of several better-than-average Westerns — among them Smoky Valley (1954), Mad River (1956), and The Big Country (1957). In these books he explores familiar terri­ tory. Two of them, Smoky Valley and The Big Country, have to do with the Easterner who comes West and must win acceptance from the community; the other, Mad River, brings its young hero back home from an unjust prison sentence, determined to reestablish himself. In each instance, though, Hamilton’s ear for dialogue and sure sense of action lift the book above the limitations of its well-worn material. 1See, for example, John P. Sisk, “The Western Hero,” Commonweal, 66 (1957), 368, or John A. Barsness, “The Breaking of the Myth: A Study of Cultural Implica­ tions in the Development of the Western Novel n the Twentieth Century,” Diss. Minnesota 1966, pp. 233-234. 2John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Uni­ versity Popular Press, 1971), pp. 78-79. 284 Western American Literature During the same period he wrote a handful of reasonably wellreceived thrillers with contemporary settings, including Murder Twice Told (1950), Line of Fire (1955), and Assignment — Murder (1956); however, he made comparatively little mark in this genre until 1960. In that year, with Death of a Citizen, he began a series of original paperback novels relating the adventures of Matt Helm, a middle-aged, tough-minded professional assassin in the employ of the United States government. The books were highly successful with both public and critics; Anthony Boucher, in fact, early on began favorably comparing them with the works of Dashiell Hammett.3 In the early volumes of the series (which now numbers sixteen books), Hamilton makes effective use of the hard-bitten professionalism that surrounds his seasoned killer. He also makes plain the degree to which Western motifs can invigorate the thriller, for the Helm stories reveal qualities of setting, plot, and character that strongly echo those of the traditional Western. One of the most obvious identifying marks of the Western is its setting. It is, as John Cawelti has said, “a story that takes place some­ where in the western United States in which the characters wear certain distinctive styles of clothing.”4 The simple, physical setting of the story, specified as being in the American West, influences the characters and their superficial actions. Thus, persons who live in the West dress and act in certain common ways, modified by the period, to be sure, but nonetheless sharing a certain commonality. When Hamilton makes his hero a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, therefore, the reader is not surprised to find Helm moving in the world of Western informality, where men dress “in a suede leather sport coat and a checked gingham shirt with one of those braided leather strings around the neck that Western males tend to wear instead of ties,” and women in “a lot of Indian silver and . . . the squaw dresses, also called fiesta dresses, the construction of which is a local industry...

A Short Textbook of Clinical Physiology.

The stated purpose of this paperback book is to try "to correlate physiology and clinical medicine, presenting only the essential facts in the briefest possible manner." The author is to be congratulated for accomplishing his objective within 197 pages. He has condensed a great deal into this little volume, but I'm not at all certain that it has a place in the library of the student or of the practicing physician. The subject matter is treated superficially, and the index is inadequate. For a paperback edition, the binding is excellent, but the protective transparent coating on the cover has the same fragility and tendency to peel as the first of the popular paperback novels of 30 years ago. I cannot honestly recommend this book to serious students because of its brevity and lack of detail. For my money, I would prefer to invest in<i>Clinical Physiology</i>by Campbell and Dickinson,

"Torn by the Lord's Eye": Flannery O'Connor's Use of Sun Imagery

paperback novels. Most of them distort, if they do not deliberately misrepresent, the content. But the artist who illustrated the Signet edition of Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away (1961) made a solid contribution to literary criticism. Set against a white background is a picture of a boy (young Tarwater) dressed in black, running through a corn field. He runs with head averted, pursued by the sun, a flaming red ball whose rays transform the corn into a field of fire. The illustration appeared too late to help reviewers many of whom apparently needed it and one cannot assess what contribution it has made to reader-understanding. But it is somewhat surprising that more professional scholars have not noted that

Ten-Gallon Hero

IN 1900 it seemed that the significance of the cowboy era would decline along with other brief but romantic episodes in American history. The Long Drive lingered only in the memories and imaginations of old cowhands. The hoe-men occupied former range land while Mennonites and professional dry farmers had sown their Turkey Red winter wheat on the Kansas prairies. To be sure, a cattle industry still flourished, but the cowboy was more like an employee of a corporation than the freelance cowboy of old.' The myth of the cowboy lived on in the Beadle and Adams paper-back novels, with the followers of Ned Buntline and the prolific Colonel Prentiss Ingraham. But this seemed merely a substitution of the more up-to-date cowboy in a tradition which began with Leatherstocking and Daniel Boone.2 If the mountain man had replaced Boone and the forest scouts, if the cowboy had succeeded the mountain man, and if the legends of Mike Fink and Crockett were slipping into the past, it would seem probable that the cowboy would follow, to become a quaint character of antiquity, overshadowed by newer heroes. Yet more than a half-century after the passing of the actual wild and woolly cowboy, we find a unique phenomenon in American mythology. Gaudy-covered Western or cowboy magazines decorate stands, windows, and shelves in drug stores, bookstores, grocery stores and supermarkets from Miami to Seattle. Hundreds of cowboy movies and television shows are watched and lived through by millions of Americans. Nearly every little boy demands a cowboy suit and a Western sixshooter cap pistol. Cowboys gaze out at you with steely eye and cocked